Aviatrix Blog 
In improvisational comedy, “Yes, and…” is a way to ensure that you build on what your fellow improviser has said to expand that line of thinking, rather than shut it off and potentially hurt the flow of the scene. The concept of “Yes, and…” has taken on a life of its own outside the improv world, and is often used in brainstorming and other business communications. But what does it have to do with enterprise network environments? It’s a useful concept to help navigate our increasingly hybrid and multicloud world.
Network environments are a multiple-choice proposition
The plethora of public cloud service providers (CSPs) along with private cloud and on-premises environments give enterprises lots of options. But being spoiled for choice doesn’t mean you have to choose one over all the others. Yes, you may need to keep certain data on-premises for security and regulatory compliance reasons, and you can leverage a public cloud for certain workloads. Yes, you select one CSP because of their strength in a particular area, and you use another CSP for a different set of advantages.
The benefits outweigh the increased complexity
There’s no question that these hybrid and multicloud environments are more complex to manage, but the advantages of a “Yes, and…” approach far outweigh the challenges it creates. In his article “The 7 Revolutionary Cloud Computing Trends That Will Define Business Success In 2025,” published in Forbes at the end of last year, Bernard Marr, one of tech’s biggest thought leaders, writes that hybrid and multicloud will become the new normal, noting that it “isn’t just about avoiding vendor lock-in—it’s about creating a flexible, resilient cloud architecture that can rapidly adapt to new opportunities and challenges.” He also predicts that edge computing will merge with the cloud, “giving birth to a seamless computational fabric that’s reshaping what’s possible.”
But you still have to manage—or better yet, tame—the complexity
One way to simplify the development, deployment, and maintenance of applications for different environments is to containerize them so they run consistently without having to worry about underlying infrastructure differences. Kubernetes further simplifies things by automating the management of containerized applications. This is why Kubernetes adoption has exploded and continues to rise in popularity.
There’s still one not-so-little challenge to solve: security
The primary focus of Kubernetes is to enable developers to increase agility and scale. This is not to say that there aren’t security features in Kubernetes; there are. And those capabilities can be augmented with additional solutions, including container network interfaces (CNIs) and service meshes. The problem, however, is that all of these are designed exclusively for Kubernetes. This creates a challenge for all of the enterprises that have said yes to Kubernetes and yes to on-premises and multicloud deployments—the majority of organizations today.
Specifically, this means it’s difficult to unify security policies across your Kubernetes and virtual machine (VM) environments. It also fragments visibility and enforcement for hybrid deployments. And you can’t address compliance requirements at scale across your cloud-native applications. All of this creates more work for the team with greater risk of inconsistencies and gaps that lower your overall security posture.
Say “Yes” to security beyond the cluster
Aviatrix Kubernetes Firewall offers a cloud-native, scalable, and centralized approach to Kubernetes security by addressing gaps left by CNIs and service meshes alone. With Aviatrix Kubernetes Firewall, you can:
- Consolidate security policies across Kubernetes, VMs, and multicloud environments with holistic network segmentation.
- Enable seamless cluster-to-cluster and Kubernetes-to-VM communication.
- Use templatized deployments to reduce manual configurations, decrease operational overhead, and simplify scaling.
- Remove security roadblocks that slow down cloud and Kubernetes deployments.
- Automate multi-cluster security enforcement and governance, reducing compliance risks.